By JOHN MARSHALL, P-I BOOK CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, April 3, 2008

His side-splitting collections have helped establish this as the Golden Age of the Humorous Essay. Call them minimemoirs, with bite and sass. Followers in the big footprints left by Sedaris' Santa elf slippers include such popular writers as Augusten Burroughs, Sarah Vowell, Steve Almond, Amy Sedaris, David Rakoff and Marion Winik.

Add Sloane Crosley to the list of self-mocking smartasses. The respected Manhattan book publicist has penned a delightful debut collection, full of suburban escapades and 20-something misadventures in the big city.

Crosley's "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" (Riverhead Books, 228 pages, $14) is a crazy salad sandwich on wry, slathered with plenty of sarcastic mustard. But her essays also display a decided difference from some of her predecessors' -- these are not just National Public Radio-size sound bites rife with one-liners.

Crosley takes her own bittersweet time in these 15 essays, carefully building momentum with telling details, deft asides, plus well-orchestrated absurdities. The new author comes across less as stand-up comic and more as an everyperson who uses her off-kilter humor to muddle through the inevitable belly flops of fledgling adulthood.

There is plenty of comic geography covered in "I Was Told There'd Be Cake." Crosley does an expected bit about summer camp curiosities, although her account is not just city kid stranger in a strange woodland. She attended a Christian-based summer camp with its "Christmas in July" celebration boasting seven days of Secret Santa, a fact that somehow escaped initial notice by her semi-practicing Jewish parents. That is, until Crosley comes home with her own little Virgin Mary costume after starring in the Christmas pageant.

Crosley also details some of her own idiosyncratic history, from collecting toy plastic ponies (often gifts from boyfriends who inevitably become ex-boyfriends) to her lapsed vegetarianism (undone by an incurable hunger for sushi) to her brief unhappy attempt at volunteer work (as a guide at the Museum of Natural History's popular butterfly exhibit who ends up being freaked by close encounters with the gigantic Atlas moth).

She even creates what could be her own new category in the Guinness records book -- first person to lock herself out of her old apartment and her new apartment in just 10 hours. (An e-mailed account of this sent to friends set Crosley off on her essayist career at the urging of an editor pal.)

Two essays in "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" are standouts that seem destined for inclusion in anthologies.

"The Ursula Cookie" details Crosley's first publishing gig, a dream turned nightmare in the person of her editor/boss. ("Ursula gave looks so stern I believed she burned calories creating them," Crosley writes.) This boss from Hades undermined her assistant's confidence to such a degree that the overeducated Crosley became a defensive bumbler of stunning ineptness.

The stress gets to her to such a degree that she ends up baking cookies at 3 a.m. -- and they come out in the unmistakable shape of her tormentor's head. Which she then presents to her at work that morning. Needless to say, the doughy likeness does not usher in halcyon harmony between the two and Crosley quits soon afterward (justice at last!).

The other gold medal winner in this collection is "You on a Stick," which begins with this Crosley observation: "There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not." What follows is an utterly hilarious account of being drafted into the wedding party of a high school classmate.

Crosley had barely given a second thought to this girl in the years since, yet now finds that she not only is supposed to be a bridesmaid at her wedding -- she is to be maid of honor.

"In order to get married these days, God isn't witness enough," Crosley grouses. "You have to have someone present who helped find your retainer after a sleepover."

So it goes in what Crosley describes as a "bridetatorship."

"I Was Told There'd Be Cake" is not an unqualified success, but first essay collections seldom are. Unevenness is inevitable. Crosley sometimes loses focus, and a few of her essays leisurely venture down too many side trips.

But Crosley, with her engaging voice, definitely compiles more hits than misses -- a strong showing by a debut essayist of irrepressible spunk.